California Adventure Part 1 – San Francisco & Petaluma

July 16, 2017

We took a trip to California to visit JT’s family and see what all the fuss about California was about.

For flights we booked a from Orlando (MCO) to LA (LAX) with Virgin America. They had decent rates and comfortable seating. I liked the touch screen monitor each seat had that allowed you to select your own movie or TV show to watch. They had good movies and The Big Bang Theory episodes for free so I was pretty content. They did not have free Wi-Fi though but did have power outlets to charge devices for free.

The screens also let you order food and drinks and even send items to other passengers. The terminal for Virgin America in Orlando was in a decent location in terminal A with a food court close by. The food court had lots of healthy food options. They have Jersey Mike’s which is what I ate, a salad place, and Italian food and a bar place. Note if you’re going to be flying with Virgin there’s a difference between Virgin America and Virgin Atlantic and they aren’t the same check-in place in the airport.

The terminal in LAX was pretty crummy and cold. Of course we ended up delayed there for almost 2 hours waiting for our flight to San Francisco. The only food available nearby was gross Burger King. The LAX airport in general was quite old and dumpy looking in comparison to the Orlando airport. It’s so crappy we had to exit down the plane stairs onto the runway then up 2 flights of stairs with our carry-on luggage when we landed. They didn’t have the overhead walkway. Ugh.

Eventually after ingesting BK Chicken we got on our flight to San Francisco. The San Francisco airport was nice and modern and clean. Including the restrooms.We had to take this weird air train to the rental car place. Fox rental car in this airport took forever to get a car thanks to 2 stupid customers ahead of us.

Hotel Chaos in San Francisco

We booked with Hotel Zelos via Hotwire online for one night in San Francisco. Unfortunately, they overbooked the hotel and did not have any room for us when we got there at 2:00 You apparently need to call ahead to make sure hotels in San Fran keep your reservations, which is pretty crummy and backwards. Never had an online reservation issue like that in Florida. They did however make arrangements to have us stay in Hotel Zetta instead. So we picked up our stuff and got a taxi ride over there. Hotel Zetta was nice. Clean and decent and we were glad they were willing to accommodate us in time of hotel need.

Petaluma Adventure

The next day we had lunch downtown in San Francisco then drove out to JT’s family in Petaluma. Petaluma was really pretty with lots of lush green hills and lots of sheep and cows all over the countryside. It’s amazing how nice and quiet and country like it was yet so close to a big city like San Francisco.There’s lots of farms in the area. Some are available for touring. Very relaxing area, reminded me of Wisconsin quite a bit.